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Sunday, 23 August 2009

Review - Iceberg Interactive - Killing Floor (PC)

Who doesn’t love Zombies ey? A likely statement made in a pitch to produce ’Killing Floor’ and essentially it’s correct, the mass public tends to have an overwhelming appetite for zombie (or do we called them "infected" nowadays? ) based media which shows no signs of slowing down, especially in the video game market.

So the premise is there, Left 4 Dead was hugely successful so who wouldn’t want a piece of that pie? But that’s the biggest problem with Killing Floor; it’s trying so hard to replicate a successful formula that it fails to gain any real identity of its own. The only area Killing Floor really flourishes is in showing us how fantastic Left 4 Dead really is!

I’m sure on paper Killing Floor reads like a riot, it has some ideas and hints of originality that it wanted to achieve but is simply let down by its delivery, for example; ’Zedtime’ in principle is a great idea, time slows down mid attack to truly regale in the violent destruction of the unfortunate zombie, and it works...sometimes. The problem being that you don’t actually trigger it! It’s just kicks in completely at random (or if there was a trigger point I sure as hell wasn’t seeing it) so sometimes it’s perfectly timed to enhance your violent decapitation of the nearest undead, other times it kicks in when your turning round to try and see the zombies behind you, not really ideal.

Another neat idea is the welding gun, during waves of Zombies you can back yourself into a bottle neck style situation and in true ’Aliens’ fashion weld the door shut, although this is more of a tactics treat and less of a visual one.

So something I’ve failed to mention so far is the single player and there is a perfectly good reason for that, it’s pretty much none existent! Sure you can play it on your own but you’re simply recreating the online multiplayer environment with you on your lonesome, words of advice, DO NOT buy this game unless you plan on playing it online.

While we're rolling out the flaws (or ’floors’ if you love a good pun!) the presentation is nothing short of hideous, the menus lack any kind of simplicity and are extremely over cumbersome, not that they’re not manageable but it’s in dire need of streamlining, the graphics also lack any real quality although they’re nowhere near as bad as the menu screens might imply.

So in closing; the story feels useless and irrelevant, the dialogue and aesthetic are embarrassing and the single player mode is redundant, but do you know what? There are far worse shooters out there and if you want some quick and easy yet strangely satisfying zombie destruction then you could do far worse, just don’t expect a revolution.